On Friday 28 January 2005 13:22, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Kurt Cagle wrote:
> > I've also found that many employers have stopped listing XML in their
> > advertisements, not because they don't need that skill, but because
> > they assume that working with XML is something that you should just
> > know if you work with most computer languages.
>
> These employers may be overly optimistic. Last night I gave an advanced
> XML presentation to a large audience of uber-geek Linux folks. Based on
> post-talk discussion, I suspect only about 30-40% were reasonably
> conversant with XML prior to that evening. If I'd realized that in
> advance I would have pitched the talk at a slightly lower level.
> It's
> certainly true that XML is more broadly understood in the community than
> it was five years ago. However, I don't think it's yet reached the level
> of ubiquity of C or Java.
I think this a topic often found on this list; "is XML living in its own dusty
corner? Is XSLT a complex language which only XML-nerds uses?"
But I do agree. I, as participant of the KDE project, think I see a general
resistance and misunderstanding towards XML. When an XML document needs a
small, automated correction it's not written as an XSLT identity transform,
but as a text-parsing Perl script, obviously horrible. An interest for
marking public XML interfaces in schema languages are more or less met with
the reaction of what it would be good for.
The KDE developers are plain developers; I think the case indicates that the
well-known topic of spreading the word of XML is of significance.
Cheers,
Frans